I was reading one of Christianaa’s rants the other day about high maintenance women. It was interesting and of course set the little wheels in my brain spinning. Then I stopped by The Book of Jackson today and he was talking about something similar. So I thought I'd explore the phenomenon of the high maintenance woman.
Ah the high maintenance woman. No one likes her, but who is she really? I did a little poll on twitter this morning asking what makes a woman high maintenance and this is a sampling of what I got:
@sirron said “if she demands too much of your time”.
@readbeanpie said “that mostly concerns high priced clothing purchases and many self beautification procedures at a high occurence rate”
@camerontilbury said “The same things that make a guy high maintenance” (I begged to differ with that one)
Most of the women who answered my poll said that they considered themselves high maintenance, but that they maintained themselves. That's a pretty common point of view in this city where there is a dearth of men willing to put one iota of effort into maintaining a woman. But that's another post for another day.
I definitely consider myself to be high maintenance, but not in the way you might think. I don't want to be given nice things and I don't require a man to treat me like a princess (though this may be my downfall), but I do have certain...let's say idiosyncrasies that I expect a man to understand and work with. Though I'm extremely easy-going in a relationship, I'm not easy and any man I'm involved with is going to have to work hard to navigate the labyrinth that is me. But is that high maintenance?
I'm not sure whether I'm convinced that being a high maintenance woman is necessarily a bad thing. I've talked in the past about how bad behaviour seems to be rewarded in relationships and I know from my own experience that being too laid back is not a good thing. And we all know that in a relationship we will only be treated as well as we demand, so isn't there something to this whole high maintenance thing? Or maybe the better question is, what is a reasonable amount of maintenance we can expect from a partner without crossing the line into high maintenance?
On the other hand though, I think the whole high maintenance thing may have been invented by some evil genius man to keep women down. Sounds extreme, but hear me out. Like the "angry black woman", isn't the high maintenance woman really nothing more than someone who has clear ideas in her mind about how she wants to be treated and asks for that treatment? Is there anything wrong with that really? This is of course based on the assumption that said woman is returning the treatment that she demands for herself; if she doesn't, isn't she just a bitch?
Men help me understand this. Is there a difference between a high maintenance woman and a selfish b*tch?
